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Give Effective Interviews

SELECTPro® is
a web-based program that helps interviewers design and organize
behavior-based selection interviews. It allows the interviewer
to easily create a custom
Interview Guide: a
document (or script) that the interviewer uses to conduct a job
interview. An Interview Guide can optionally be turned into an
Automated Online Interview.
This allows candidates to provide written responses to the
interview questions over the web--ideal for a pre-interview
screening or first interview.

Few people can spend the time and effort it takes to create
effective behavioral interview questions. Take advantage of the
twenty years of human resource consulting that led
Dr. Pfaff to the formation of
SELECTPro.

Impress candidates with well organized and professional
interviews. Don't lose good candidate due to poor interviews.

Re-use interview guides to save yourself time.

Trust your gut feeling, but only after asking the right
questions and gathering the right information.

Get consistent interview results by giving consistent
interviews.

Put your hiring managers out of their misery by providing them
with a simple and effective hiring process.

Spend the time during an interview paying attention to what the
candidate is saying, not racking your brain trying to come up
with another clever question to ask.

Don't Gamble on Making a Good Hire!

Interviewing is a high-stakes
game: You spend an hour with each of a dozen potential job
applicants, make a choice, then roll the dice and take your
chances. Choose the wrong candidate and your organization could
pay the price for months or even years to come. And it can be a
steep price. A professional job that pays $48,000 annually and
turns over too quickly can cost a company as much as twice that
in hiring expenses and lost productivity.

That means the 60 minutes you invest in meeting with applicants
had better be time well spent. Hiring employees is like going to
Las Vegas -- You never know if you're going to win. But good
gamblers play the high probabilities. Interviewers should do the
same thing.

The critical skills for employee success usually are best
revealed in interviews. That means a good HR practitioner has to
be a proficient detective who asks the kind of questions that get
applicants to open up and reveal their good and bad workplace
characteristics.

Behavior-Based Interviewing

To increase the odds of making the right hiring selection,
behavior-based interviewing is the method of choice. Behavior-based
interviewing is an approach that looks at past behavior as
the best predictor of future performance. This systematic
approach helps reduce turnover by selecting people whose skills
and motivations match job requirements. It has proven to be a
more valid way to assess job skills in an interview. Behavior-based
interviewing rejects the old-school practice of hiring
based on one's gut feeling--the practice known as "I know a good
one when I see one."

Behavioral interviewing is one of the best ways to explore a
candidate, but using good behavioral questions is important. And
in crafting questions, hypothetical is out; reality is in. For
example, rather than asking, "What would you do if ..." one
should ask, "Tell me about a time when you ..." Just because
people can give the right hypothetical answer doesn't mean they
can do what they say. You want the candidate to tell you about a
real-life experience.

SelectPro

SELECTPro provides two ways for you to gather interview information:

Using face-to-face behavioral interview guides.

Using automated online interviewing where candidates answer the interview
questions over the web.

Thanks for the questions! SELECTPro is an excellent idea.
Here's the feedback I received from one of my candidates: "Philip, I
was impressed with how well prepared you were with an excellent
set of questions and hope that my answers were equally as good."

-- Philip Nathan, Director of Engineering with a major software company